# ISImed: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning using Intrinsic Spatial Information in Medical Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16947 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16947/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04592/) (2020)
- [The RSNA-ASNR-MICCAI BraTS 2021 Benchmark on Brain Tumor Segmentation and Radiogenomic Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02314/) (2021)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models Advance Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05224/) (2021)
- [Scaling and Benchmarking Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01235/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Cardiac MR Image Segmentation by Anatomical Position Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02757/) (2019)
- [AirLab: Autograd Image Registration Laboratory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09907/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper demonstrates that spatial information can be used to learn interpretable representations in medical images using Self-Supervised Learning (SSL). Our proposed method, ISImed, is based on the observation that medical images exhibit a much lower variability among different images compared to classic data vision benchmarks. By leveraging this resemblance of human body structures across multiple images, we establish a self-supervised objective that creates a latent representation capable of capturing its location in the physical realm. More specifically, our method involves sampling image crops and creating a distance matrix that compares the learned representation vectors of all possible combinations of these crops to the true distance between them. The intuition is, that the learned latent space is a positional encoding for a given image crop. We hypothesize, that by learning these positional encodings, comprehensive image representations have to be generated. To test this hypothesis and evaluate our method, we compare our learned representation with two state-of-the-art SSL benchmarking methods on two publicly available medical imaging datasets. We show that our method can efficiently learn representations that capture the underlying structure of the data and can be used to transfer to a downstream classification task.